On May 29, 6:51?am, wrote:
On May 29, 2:27 am, Chuck Gould wrote:





Interesting 4 day, 3 night cruise.

Splendid weather.

Our general destination was about 60 miles from Seattle. We
encountered a "cruise in" sponsored by a large cruising club. I know
several people associated with the group and we were bs-ing about
things in general when one of the organizers mentioned, "We originally
had close to 40 boat scheduled to make the Memorial Day Cruise, but as
the date got closer more and more them dropped out. We wound up with
16 boats instead of 40. Almost everybody who dropped out mentioned
fuel costs as either the main reason or one of the more important
reasons for cancelling."

Interesting.

We stopped at Bainbride Island on the way back to Seattle today,
(Bainbridge is just a few miles from Seattle), and Eagle Harbor was
*jammed* until very late on Monday afternoon. Looks like people are
going boating, but not going as far.

A possible upside may be that the casual, once-in-a-while, jerkaround
boaters might not be out at all this year. The amount of goofball
nonsense on the VHF, bogus Maydays, kids playing with the radio, and
just plain clueless VHF operation seemed to be way, way down. Either
the screwballs have migrated to text messagin one another or there are
fewer of them on the water........

Starting to see lots of 20-25 footer trailer boats for sale on the
net. More than usual for this time of the season. My neighbor has not
even uncovered his 22 foot Grady, don't think he is going to put it in
this year, I know it was getting expensive for him to run it last
season. Me, I am watching now for something with a decent 50 horse and
trailer I can put with my Brockway skiff. Might be a good season for
me to find one with the gas prices being as they are.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Everybody has a different level of dedication to the pastime, and
that's fine. There are a few people who feel that the last thing in
life they would ever give up would be boating, no matter what the
costs or other sacrifices required. On the other end of the scale
there are folks who might go out in a boat if somebody offered them a
ride, but certainly wouldn't pay for the experience.....

Most eveybody else is somewhere in between. A high percentage will
probably spend $100 per weekend to boat. Move that to $200, and there
will be some dropouts. Move it to $300, and the crowd would begin to
thin considerably. Every hundred bucks higher will accelerate the
attrition rate. There's no cost level at which eveybody will instantly
give up boating, but we only need to look around to see that at each
increment of increased cost we lose a few more folks who cannot (or
choose not to) afford it.